"How Did They End Up Here?": Women and the Southwark Stews

When we imagine Southwark’s medieval brothels, it is easy to see only the lurid stereotype: women flocking to the stewhouses by choice, lured by quick money. The reality was far messier. Very few women arrived at Bankside freely, and almost none could stay there on their own terms. Their paths into the stews were shaped by poverty, migration, coercion, and by the regulations that channelled them into the Bishop of Winchester’s licensed district.

Driven to the Margins

In 1276, London’s authorities declared that no prostitute could live within the City walls. From then on, sex work was pushed just across the river, into Southwark. Bankside became the obvious place: outside the City’s reach, yet tightly controlled by the Bishop’s officials. By the late Middle Ages, Southwark was notorious. For the women who ended up there, it was less a free choice than the only place left open.

Poverty and Precarity

Many women arrived through desperation. A widow without a pension, a young servant dismissed without a reference, a migrant who had left her village in search of work — all found themselves with few options. Domestic service and laundry work were insecure and poorly paid. The stewhouses, at least, provided lodging and food. But entry came at a cost: women had to pay rent for their rooms, keep up with fines, and live under constant scrutiny.

The Machinery of Control

Once inside the system, life was tightly regulated. The Bishop’s ordinances dictated what women could wear, where they could live, and even when they could work. Aprons and striped hoods — symbols of respectable wives — were banned. On Sundays and feast days the women were expelled from the liberty altogether. If a woman fell behind on her rent, became pregnant, or showed signs of illness, she could be cast out without notice. Even clothing became a boundary, reminding them that they were never to be confused with “respectable” women.

Names in the Records

Most of these women remain nameless. But occasionally a few slip through the records. Isabel Lane was reportedly coerced into prostitution by her mistress. Margery Curson appears as a bawd, prosecuted for running a brothel. Joan West and Katherine Marshman surface in court cases as women caught up in the machinery of discipline. A subsidy list from the 1520s even names several female “bawds of the Bank” as householders, a reminder that some women managed to carve out positions of authority — though always within a system stacked against them.

Migration and the “Foreign” Stews

Southwark also drew women from abroad. Tax records list foreign servants working in the stews, and Londoners complained more than once about a “Flemish monopoly.” The surname Frowe — derived from the Dutch and German word for “woman” — crops up repeatedly here. Migration gave women a way into London, but also made them vulnerable to exploitation in a district designed to contain outsiders.

Expulsion and Humiliation

If women resisted or broke the rules, punishment followed. They could be fined heavily, imprisoned, or set upon the cucking-stool, a seat used for public shaming, before being banished from the liberty. It was a spectacle that reinforced their place on the margins. Entry into the stews might come quietly, but exit was often loud and humiliating.

So how did women end up in the Southwark stews? Through poverty, through coercion, through migration, and through laws that left them little alternative. Their lives were shaped by forces far larger than themselves — Church ordinances, City bans, economic precarity. And yet within this world, they endured, supported one another, and in some cases even managed to hold authority. Remembering them today means looking past the caricatures of “sin” and “vice,” and seeing the human stories of survival that lay beneath.

A medeival German woodcut of a man approaching a brothel, 1477